Get Lit 2011

A handful of the early events in next week's literary festival.

EWU’s 13th annual Get
Lit! Festival kicks off next week with a variety of events under
the umbrella of “Telling the American Story.”

Along
with the writers profiled in this section, the first two days of Get
Lit (April 13-14) feature three poetry slams, a “Women’s Votes” exhibit at the MAC, an art exhibit at Chase Gallery, and improv comedy (“Poets Up!”) at the Blue
Door every Friday in April.

Students
in other people’s classes glance at the periodic table — all those
two-letter combinations and confusing numbers — and start snoring. But
Kean has tales to tell.

His book from last July, The Disappearing Spoon, attaches
human-interest stories to each of the hundred-odd elements. Liquid
helium, for example — deep-freeze it, and it’ll flow up and over a wall.
Kean describes super-acids that can eat through glass — and your hand.
The surprising connections among your cell phone, a couple of obscure
elements called niobium and tantalum, and the Rwandan massacres of the
1990s. What lithium — now commonly prescribed to those with a bipolar
disorder — has to do with your circadian rhythm and level of creativity.
Why one particular element is so feared in Japan that in one movie,
Godzilla is killed off with cadmium-tipped missiles.

But
Astounding Facts of Chemistry won’t help students write lab reports,
and Kean realizes that his book is just a supplement to actual study. In
a recent email, he lists the advantages of telling the elements’ human
stories: “Especially when we can follow along with the historical
process of discovery that scientists used,” he says, “and see where they
made mistakes, and what their reasoning was at each point, we’re liable
to retain that information.

“Readers will learn something about the periodic table from The Disappearing Spoon —
not enough to ace an AP test, but something about each element, about
all the places the elements pop up unexpectedly in daily life.”

And so what if he popularizes or even sensationalizes chemistry?

As
Kean says, “Better that people get excited about chemistry at least
once, rather than leaving them with only the bad memories of failed lab
experiments and confounding equations.”

Standup
comic, public speaker, playwright, writer, un-presenter, tummeler —
Heather Gold is such a Renaissance woman that she creates whole avenues
of inquiry and then has to name them (often drawing on Yiddish).

The
tummeling thing is a mindset and means of communicating that seeks to
take unsatisfying one-sided interactions (customer-service calls,
presentations, much discourse on the Web, basically all discourse in big
corporations) and turn them into conversations. “Putting the human back
into tech,” she says.

Gold’s
contribution to Get Lit!, though, is her one-woman show “I Look Like an
Egg but I Identify as a Cookie,” in which she relates a comingof-age
(and coming-out) tale through the lens of baking. It’s Martha Stewart
meets Dan Savage.

On
Margaret Regan’s first foray into reporting on the Mexican border, she
ran into a man named Ismael Vasquez. His friend Silverio had died hours
earlier trying to cross into America.

She brought back a story with passages like these: “Silverio began to have dolor de corazón, Vasquez says, clutching his own chest to demonstrate his friend’s pain. And dolor de brazos, he adds, gripping his arms. And then, finally, simply, he died.” (Read the whole thing at tinyurl.com/tucsondesert.)

“So many migrant bodies, they had to bring a refrigerated truck ... It took me days to get over that smell of that truck.”

At
Get Lit!, she’ll be drawing from her experiences and reading from her
book, a collection of her reporting from the border, called The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands.

Josseline? She was someone else who tried to endure the Arizona desert after crossing the border. A 14-year-old girl.

It may be a jeremiad, but then again, an environmentalist’s warning is usually called that — until time proves it true.

Of
course, Barlow isn’t the only one saying that the world faces a water
crisis in the near future. She’s just one of the more persuasive and
eloquent.

Twenty years
from now, she predicts, residents in poverty-stricken countries — where
the world’s biggest cities are booming — will have no way to treat
their waste-water, thereby poisoning their only sources of drinking
water. To feed the world’s growing population, industrial agriculture
will drain aquifers and heavily pollute waterways, creating new deserts
across the globe.

Corporations
will purify the ocean’s salt water, and they’ll sell it at a huge
profit. Thirsty cities will be deserted. Poor people will die.

With
her eloquence, perhaps, Barlow will be able to convince the right
people of the impending emergency. If we’re lucky, she’ll shift the
momentum, and we’ll look back at her writings simply as tirades — pure
science fiction.